Revelations from Keynote II

[Cilia]

The thing with Alexander is that while, from one viewpoint, things go around and around infinitely.... there is only one timeline, and there was only ever one timeline. It's a stable time loop, where everything plays out the same way every time (except there's only really one time).

Objection!

This requires an in-depth understanding of what an observer is.

An observer has a very special role in time, that is it determines which causal pathway happened.

To use an example, say we set up a flashlight in front of a piece of plastic with two slits. If you turn on the flashlight, photons stream through the two slots and into the background. However, given each photon can only travel through one of the two slots, we can't know which one because they simply move too fast for us to observe individual photons, so we have to assume it could have gone through both. However, say a device was created that could tell which of the two slots a photon went through. Now we have knowledge of which slot the photon traveled through, but only because something was created to determine that.

The "device" mentioned here is the observer; without it we'd have to assume that each given photon could have traveled through either of the two slots.

It's a lot like applying a save state to reality. If you save your game and choose option A, option B becomes impossible - you've observed option A, which is mutually exclusive with option B. You can choose to go back and reload the save state if you want to see the outcome of option B at a later date (for whatever reason), but the characters aren't aware of this - option A's characters are not the same as option B's characters. You are, in effect, the observer.

Apply this to time. Every action taken by everyone and everything creates infinitely tessellating possibilities, but because this "us" only exists in one timeline (option A), we can't observe the "us"es that exist in every other possibility.

In the context of Alexander, that means yes, there has to be a timeline that created Alexander - because there are infinite timelines where he never existed at all. Someone or something had to create him. The tricky part about Alexander is that due to his power over time he is essentially his own observer, but he can only observe timelines in which he exists. Of the infinitely tessellating possibilities stemming from everything that happens within his storyline, Alexander has to always make the same choices and observe only the timeline we play, because otherwise it creates a temporal paradox.

Do we remember each individual instance of the time loop? No, it's a quantum singularity - everything that happens in and around Alexander has to happen in our timeline, because from our perspective anything else creates a temporal paradox. But... even though we can't observe them, there are infinite other timelines where things played out differently. Something, at some point in some timeline has to be responsible for Alexander's creation and time loop, we just can't observe what because from our perspective Alexander has always existed as a part of the timeline.

It's why I've postulated Hydaelyn acts as our observer (She chooses only the timeline She wants, i.e. the one where we're successful even in the face of nigh-impossible odds; your PC's deaths are just possibilities She chooses to not observe).

TL;DR - time is really complicated, but to say there's only one timeline isn't accurate. There's just only one we can observe.